Ecommerce Blog

Do you sell products that lend themselves to repeat purchases? This could be vitamins, pharmacy, contact lenses, hair product, office supplies, grocery or anything that you expect someone to “use up.”

Amazon sells, amongst other things, coffee beans. Check out the offer for free shipping and a 15% discount for customers who want to subscribe to the product:

Here’s what Amazon’s doing right:

1. Offers of free shipping and discount are strong motivators for repeat purchases.
2. Allows you to select the subscription schedule for 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.
3. Provides a customer service, no need to return to the site again, place order and wait when quantities get low.
4. The offer is placed in the product description and right near the cart button. Impossible to miss if you want to buy this product.

I bet you’ll be hard pressed to find many other online retailers taking advantage of this technique.

Love Your Landing Page: Tips to Increase Ecommerce Conversion
Free webinar: February 14th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Khalid Hajsaleh, President, INVESP Consulting
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Yesterday we talked about OfficeMax’ viral campaign and its goal to brand itself as “human friendly.” OfficeMax has recently redesigned its website, and you’ll notice right away its clean look and innovative approach to navigation.

Now customers can hone in on specific products with one click:

Which you have to admit is more user-friendly than Staples’ or Office Depot’s methods, where you have to first locate the correct category, then forage from there:

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Love Your Landing Page: Tips to Increase Ecommerce Conversion
Free webinar: February 14th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Khalid Hajsaleh, President, INVESP Consulting
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Cork’d is a social network for wine lovers and its complementary video podcast “Wine Library TV” has a lot of neat features. Check out my 11 reasons why I heart this podcast (even though I’m not much of a wine drinker):

1. Vivacious Host

There’s nothing worse than a monotone host. Not a problem for Gary Vaynerchuk.

2. High Profile Guests

Like Joanne Colan from Rocketboom.

3. Interactive Video Format

Viewers can add tags or comments to the video, vote each others’ comments up and down and reply to other comments - right on the timebar:

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12 Things Retailers Must Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: January 24th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Linda Bustos, Emerging Media Analyst, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Found this fun tool the other day where you can check your blog (or any other web page)’s reading level. Get Elastic happens to be a College/Undergrad level.

Readability algorithms work by analyzing word and sentence length to assess difficulty. While I’d say this is for entertainment purposes only, if your audience is consumers it is important to take a look at your blog and website content and make sure it’s accessible to the general public.

The average adult reads at an 8th or 9th grade level, and 20% read below the 5th grade level. Would you want to create a usability problem for 20% of your customers? Not only that, but many English-as-a-second-language (or third, or fourth) may not comprehend above the Elementary level.

How could your conversion rates increase simply by using simpler language and shorter sentences on product pages, shipping information pages and email marketing? Jakob Nielsen has a good article on making your site more accessible to lower literacy visitors.

Because blogs are intended to pre-sell product and/or engage in 2-way conversation with customers and retailers, it’s important to write for readability. I ran the readability test on the top 50 online retailer blogs based on subscribers and here’s what I found:

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12 Things Retailers Must Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: January 24th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Linda Bustos, Emerging Media Analyst, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Thinking about running a Facebook advertising campaign? It helps to pick apart what advertisers are already doing. Today we’ll examine several campaigns of online retailers from ad copy and design to landing page and boil them down to 11 tips for Facebook banners and graphic ads.

Apple

Ad

I’m not too crazy about the ad text - it seems a bit awkward. It could be shortened to “Hottest Phone, Lowest Price. $399 + Free Shipping from the Apple Store.” Easier to read, capitalized letters are proven to convert higher in PPC - why should this be any different? Oh, and ditch the Christmas messaging, it’s January 21st!

Landing Page

This is a great landing page choice - leading right to the conversion page for the product advertised. BUT this is the Apple.com store, and the ad was served to me as a Canadian. Geo-targeting is available, please use it. It’s not clear that this is the US store unless you check the address bar. Especially disappointing as the iPhone requires “hacking” to be used in Canada. Can the average Facebook user figure this all out?

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12 Things Retailers Must Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: January 24th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Linda Bustos, Emerging Media Analyst, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Google Trends is just one of the nifty tools the Big G hath bestowed upon the Internet marketing community. Basically to type in keywords to compare their search volumes against each other over time. There’s also a “what’s hot” element, each day there’s a list of “Today’s Hot Trends.” Some of them are really hard to believe that they are remotely search-worthy, but clicking on a keyword will show

But I digress…Back to the Hack!

If you run separate online stores for different countries, you need to understand that sometimes a couch is a chesterfield, sneakers are trainers, french fries are chips, and candy bars are chocolate bars. Google Trends lets you enter a number of variations of keywords that essentially describe the same product and figure out which countries use which term more often.

Example 1:

“flash drive” vs. “USB drive” vs. “memory stick”

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12 Things Retailers Must Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: January 24th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Linda Bustos, Emerging Media Analyst, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Today is January 14th, which means we’re only one month away from what some believe is the 2nd largest retailing event of the year. Last year, Valentine’s Day raked in $905 Million in online sales.

Though men are expected to spend the most on Valentine gifts and are stereotypically procrastinators, ecommerce marketers should not run a last-minute Valentine’s campaign. Today we’ll talk about ways you can sell lovin’ through email, social media and your website.

Interesting Statistics

Last year, Discovery Card conducted a Valentine’s Day Shopping Survey and found that:

• Men expected to spend an average of $127 on their ladies, and the ladies $74. Of the women, 53% said they would purchase gadgets for their men.

• 65% would make their purchase one week before February 14
• 10% of men would wait until February 14
• 39% of women planned on spending nothing
• 22% of men and 15% of women planned to purchase a gift online

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12 Things Retailers Must Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: January 24th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Linda Bustos, Emerging Media Analyst, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Cross-selling (offering items related to the product like accessories and warranties) and up-selling (suggesting more expensive alternatives) are effective merchandising tools both online and offline. You could think of cross-selling as an etailer’s answer to “would you like fries with that?”

Cross-Selling and up-selling have a number of benefits, and can increase:

• average order value

• conversion rates by guiding customers to appropriate alternatives if a product they’re viewing isn’t right
• exposure for high margin items
• customer satisfaction by suggesting related items to enhance or augment the product and user experience
• awareness about the depth of your product offering

There are many places on your website where you can cross-sell, the most common being the product page and on the view cart page - right before checkout. You can also cross-sell on the home page (if you logged a user’s last visit or they sign in) or in a post-purchase email. Today we’ll just focus on the product pages and view cart.

Not all retailers use cross-selling in both areas, some only cross-sell on the product pages to avoid confusion, indecision and cart abandonment upon checkout. It’s important to cross-sell wisely on view cart pages as this is a valid concern - let’s look at some dos and don’ts for both product pages and view cart pages, and then dig into some real life examples from top retailers.

Cross-Selling Dos

• Show relevant items whether they are accessories or alternatives to the same product

• Show larger sizes or other same-product up-sells when possible (Example: Tiger Direct)
• Use personal words like “you” rather than “we” - “You Might Also Like” vs. “We Suggest”
• Use emotional words like “need” and “want” (Examples: Palm.com “Need accessories?” and McDonald’s “Do you want fries with that?”)
• Use words like “Special Offers,” “Special Offers for You” or “Great Deals” to communicate savings and value
• Create urgency with “Limited Time Offer” or “Limited Quantities” (Example: Tiger Direct)
• Do save your sale / low margin items for the view cart page. Show regular priced / high margin alternatives from the product pages.
• Make it easy to return to the product page after you add a suggested item - even better to keep shopper on the product page but clearly let the shopper know an item was added to the cart
• Offer a mix of price points when suggesting items on the view cart page
• Show “no brainers” like gift cards, warranties, batteries et cetera that are easily understood by the customer, don’t require a click away from the page and are easy sellers
• Offer discounts on one item when you buy another item on the “view cart/bag/basket” page (Examples: Blue Nile and Macy’s)
• Provide enough detail on add-ons (thumbnail, price and description) so customer is less likely to click away from cart page
• Let the customer check off add-ons from the view cart page rather than buttons for each product. Customers may think adding a product to the cart will take them away from the cart page and they’ll get lost (Example: Palm.com)
• It’s a good idea to show “top rated” suggestions along with review content to build trust and catch interest. I haven’t found an example of this, please comment if you’ve seen one

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

Stephan Spencer wrote an excellent article for Search Engine Land last week that explains how you can use the rel=nofollow attribute on your internal links to control the flow of “Page Rank” throughout your site. If this is all Greek-geek to you, I’ll explain in a moment what this means. But you should read this post because this is one white-hat SEO tactic that hasn’t been milked to death by all your online retail competitors. Out of Internet Retailer’s Hot 100 online stores, Stephan found only one using this technique, and even that store could go a bit further with it.

Page Rank (think Larry Page) is Google’s way of assigning authority to a web page. You can read more about it here. Your home page is likely to have the highest Page Rank because it’s linked to more often by other websites than your other pages. Page Rank flows between pages on your own site, flows in from other sites’ links to you and “leaks” through links to other sites. If you need more information on this, check out SEOMoz’ Whiteboard Friday on the subject.

Sculpting Page Rank is really plugging up leaks that don’t need to be there, and controlling the flow of “link juice” within your site, sending more juice to important pages like product pages and cutting off unnecessary pages (that you don’t need to rank in search engines) like contact, view cart, privacy policy, terms and conditions and so on.

When you selectively add rel=”nofollow” to links like “add to cart,” “buy now,” “submit,” for example, you tell search engines not to follow the link as they crawl your site and not to include the link in the overall (and highly complex) Page Rank calculation.

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

Jakob Nielsen recently wrote an article “Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous…” In it he proposes that many Web 2.0 trends are not only useless for web users but can actually cut into your profits. He covered a lot of ground (definitely check out the article) and made a lot of good points. But a couple things don’t sit too well with me.

Nielsen Bashes AJAX

Nielsen argues AJAX and rich user interfaces are too complicated for the average user. Even though AJAX makes it easier to get more done on one page without reloading, it’s easy for people to miss the subtle changes on the page and think nothing happened. This could be a problem for “add to cart” and “checkout” processes. He recommends you stick with the old-school, page-by-page way of doing things.

“Users often overlooked modest changes, such as when they added something to the cart and it updated only a small area in a corner of the screen. It’s deadly for e-commerce sites when users can’t operate the shopping cart, so it’s usually best to stick to simple shopping-cart designs that everybody understands.”

Kudos to Howard Kaplan over at GrokDotCom for pointing out the fallacy of Nielsen’s arguments.

“Aren’t websites “more usable” today than they were then? Absolutely. So, a better question for Jakob would be, with so many of the top sites focusing on usability for so many years, why aren’t Conversion Rates any higher? According to the latest Shop.org numbers, they’re not even trending upward.

If he’s right, and the “web is a tool” users, as most usability practitioners would like to call your site’s visitors (can you think of any positive meanings to the word ‘users’?), attempt to accomplish tasks, Conversion Rates (the ratio of actions taken per total visitors) should have risen each-and-every year (until, naturally, the big-bad Web2.0 trend came to bring them crashing down).”

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

Last week we held an affiliate marketing webinar with Shawn Collins (recap and replay available). We covered a lot of ground in one short hour, but one area that wasn’t discussed in depth is how affiliate programs can affect your SEO.

Problem: Duplicate Content Knocks Your Pages from Search Engines

Some affiliate networks provide affiliates with direct links to your site with an appended URL including an affiliate ID. An example would be http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456.

When search engines visit your affiliates’ websites, unless your affiliate has added a “rel=nofollow” attribute to the link to tell search engines not to follow the link, the search engine will follow the link and index the landing page — a duplicate copy of your home page, category page or product page, wherever the link was pointing. If an affiliate builds up link juice with keyword-rich anchor text to its own copies of your page (for example, buying paid links on blogs), it’s possible that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 outranks http://www.yoursite.com. What’s worse is that the duplicate content filter might wipe out your page for showing in results for that keyword/s, especially when you have thousands of affiliates and thousands of duplicate pages. This means you pay commissions on sales from organic search that you otherwise could have attracted yourself.

2 Possible Workarounds

A 301 (permanent) eliminates this possibility as you tell the search engine that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 is forever the same as http://www.yoursite.com. And yes, any Page Rank the affiliate URL has will be passed on to your site. To do this, you likely have to bring your affiliate program in-house and create a proper tracking system so affiliates get their commissions.

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

BestBuy.ca (not the .com version) has a little poll on the home page asking “How Have You Done Your Holiday Shopping?” With over 5,000 responses it’s not a bad sample size. I, of course, fall into the “Bought Everything Online” group, but I’m not surprised that 34% have yet to start their Christmas hunt for gifts.

Almost 29% have researched online and bought in-store. It’s a reality that some of your hard earned traffic isn’t interested in buying online but they are looking for ideas. This is fine if you are a multi-channel retailer who can offer in-store pickup convenience. But what if you’re selling purely online? Are you servicing “researchers” only to lose them to a local store? Now is your opportunity to present a compelling case for buying from YOU right NOW.

Tips for Converting Last Minute Shoppers:

1. Communicate the convenience of buying from you rather than a local store by reminding them of the pain of line-ups, parking and crowded stores. How you do this is up to you, get creative.

2. Now that most retailers’ free ground shipping offers have expired,offer a break on overnight shipping, or free overnight shipping (like Ice.com) if possible.

3. Include free gift wrap so the item can be shipped directly to the recipient (or just save the shopper time).

4. Include a link to a gift finder section (if you have one) or other popular categories to encourage the customer to buy something for everyone on their list. “We’ve got something for everyone on your list” is good site-wide messaging (if this makes sense for your product offering).

5. Upsell with gift cards - especially electronic gift cards that can be delivered instantly.

Things to keep in mind for next year (design/strategic):

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

At the end of November, I posted about online retailers showing holiday shipping cutoff dates on their home pages. Now more than two weeks later, and with just over a week left before Christmas, we find more retailers adding this information to their home pages.

On November 28, I posted a few examples of online retailers who gave their home pages a Christmas makeover. Bath & Body Works does the same:

November 28

December 17

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

It’s a shame that CompUSA will not be with us much longer, because it gives us a great example of the potential for RSS feeds for ecommerce sites. Check it out while you can: http://www.compusa.com/help/rss_feeds.asp

This is a close-up:

This is how a sample feed appears in my Google Reader:

Online retailers that use RSS syndication for product content are few and far between, the ones that do usually are electronics and computer related (more tech savvy audience, I assume). It’s likely that the general public still doesn’t understand what RSS is or how it can help them, so CompUSA provides a nice little introduction to what RSS is with links to resources and popular RSS readers.

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos

Nielsen Online recently released some data from the top 1,000 influential blogs (determined by inbound link popularity) and discovered that gift recommendations, reviews and gift buying guides were all the buzz in the blogosphere.

As you would expect, gadgets, gaming gifts and other techie stuff was most discussed according to the press release. Which makes this leaderboard a bit of a head-scratcher:

Top Online Retailers Ranked by Buzz Growth for Week Ending December 2nd

Source: Nielsen Online

Are these really the top discussed retailers for product reviews and recommendations? Hallmark? Last time I checked, Hallmark wasn’t sellin’ no iPhones or Wiis. So I looked under the hood at Google Blog Search, and found that there were a lot of results for Hallmark on deals/coupon sharing sites, Hallmark buildings, the Hallmark Channel, and Paris Hilton suing Hallmark for cards like this:

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Analytics: 12 Things to Learn from Christmas ‘07
Free webinar: Date To Be Announced, January 2008
Guest Panelist: To Be Announced
View the ecommerce webinar archive

Original post by Linda Bustos